It’s official: to protect baby’s brain, turn off the TV

A decade ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendations on …

A decade ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that parents limit TV consumption by children under two years of age. The recommendations were based as much on common sense as science, because studies of media consumption and infant development were themselves in their infancy.

The research has finally grown up. And though it’s still ongoing, it’s mature enough for the AAP to release a new, science-heavy policy statement on babies watching television, videos or any other passive media form.

Their verdict: It’s not good, and probably bad.

Media, whether playing in the background or designed explicitly as an infant educational tool, has "potentially negative effects and no known positive effects for children younger than 2 years,” concluded the AAP’s report, released Oct. 18 at the Academy’s annual meeting in Boston and scheduled for November publication in the journal Pediatrics. “Although infant/toddler programming might be entertaining, it should not be marketed as or presumed by parents to be educational.”

Since the AAP made its original recommendations in 1999, passive entertainment screens—televisions, DVD players, computers streaming video—have become ubiquitous, and the average 12-month-old gets between one and two hours of screen time per day. (Interactive screens, such as iPads and other tablets, are considered in the new recommendations.) The 0- to 2-year age group has become a prime target for commercial educational programming, often used by parents convinced that it’s beneficial.

As screens proliferated, so did research. “There have been about 50 studies that have come out on media use by children in this age group between 1999 and now,” said Ari Brown, a pediatrician and member of the AAP committee that wrote the new report.

Used at night, TV might help kids fall asleep, but that appears to come at a delayed cost of subsequent sleep disturbances and irregularities. While the result of TV-induced sleep problems hasn’t been directly studied, poor sleep in infants is generally linked to problems with mood, behavior and learning.

At other times, media consumption comes with opportunity costs, foremost among them the silence of parents. “While television is on, there’s less talking, and talk time is very important in language development,” said Brown.

Three studies since 1999 have tracked educational television use and language development, and they found a link between increased TV time and developmental delays. Whether that’s a cause or effect—parents who leave kids in front of televisions might simply be poor teachers—isn’t clear, nor are the long-term effects, but the AAP called the findings “concerning.” In the same vein, there may also be a link to attention problems.

Even when media plays in the background, it distracts babies from play, an activity that is known to have deep developmental benefits. And for parents who use media to carve out a few precious, necessary free minutes in busy schedules, Brown recommended letting kids entertain themselves.

“We know you can’t spend 24 hours a day reading to your child and playing with them. That’s okay. What’s also okay is your child playing independently,” she said. “That’s valuable time. They’re problem-solving. They’re using their imagination, thinking creatively and entertaining themselves.”

As for iPads and other kid-friendly interactive computing devises, Brown said research has barely started, much less come to conclusions. But she counseled skepticism of promotional claims, which have been made with some of the same zeal as products of now-dubious standing, such as the controversial Baby Einstein videos.

“The way these kids’ programs came out was, ‘These are really educational! They’re going to help your kids learn!’ Well that’s great, but prove it. Show me the science,” Brown said. “I don’t have a problem with touch screens, and they’re not necessarily bad. But we need to understand how this affects kids.”

87 Reader Comments

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

Scurrilous

You're right! I'll just calmly explain that to my infant who emits ear-piercing screams every time someone is not holding her! "Entertain yourself, please!" Or we'll just start dinner at 1:00 when she takes a nap.

My in-laws purchased the 'your baby can read' videos for our boy when he was six months old. I'd agree with the 'mesmerizing glowing box' description for a kid under a certain age. But when he started the first inklings of speech at somewhere between twelve and eighteen months, he really started to interact with the videos and worked hard to repeat the words he saw and heard on the screen. I would say the 1-1.5 hours of TV per day of TV time is a legit number, though I've never measured.

So how do you suppose his language skills would have developed during that time if you were reading and speaking to him during the 1-1.5 hours per day? You're a lot more interactive (I hope) than the TV.

I'll admit that I didn't give you much to go on, but I'll say it anyway: You don't have much to go on. I assure you that he's well taken care of and as intellectually sharp and physically able as any other two year old.

You'll never hear me say otherwise. I certainly am not questioning your capabilities as a parent, because I don't know them.

I was just posing a rhetorical statement for the purposes of spurring conversation.

My wife is at home and knows more about his daily habits than I do, so I can't say with any certainty what his daily TV intake is, but I can say the PS3 gets used more for Bob the Builder than Need for Speed.

We read to him and with him constantly. He climbs around on the playground almost every day. He cooks with us. He counts to 10 and screws up the order of 13 through 19 and calls 20 "2010." He jumps off furniture. He identifies letters and knows their sounds. And just this weekend he started saying "Mommy - M. Daddy - D," which was a really nice surprise. I'm pretty sure he's an average kid but to us he's the smartest toddler on the planet.

Also he's not quite two, and only as parents have we grown to understand the use of months to identify a child over a year. The difference between 18 and 22 months is like the difference between a 21 and 40 year old.

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

Scurrilous

You're right! I'll just calmly explain that to my infant who emits ear-piercing screams every time someone is not holding her! "Entertain yourself, please!" Or we'll just start dinner at 1:00 when she takes a nap.

My daughter was the same. Ergo Princess Bride at the age of 18m, Pride and Prejudice at 15m.

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

Scurrilous

You're right! I'll just calmly explain that to my infant who emits ear-piercing screams every time someone is not holding her! "Entertain yourself, please!" Or we'll just start dinner at 1:00 when she takes a nap.

So then; what she has learned is that every time she screams you will drop everything to pay attention to her? Now you just have to hope that it doesn't carry on for the rest of your life

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

Scurrilous

You're right! I'll just calmly explain that to my infant who emits ear-piercing screams every time someone is not holding her! "Entertain yourself, please!" Or we'll just start dinner at 1:00 when she takes a nap.

So then; what she has learned is that every time she screams you will drop everything to pay attention to her? Now you just have to hope that it doesn't carry on for the rest of your life

My thoughts exactly. At least she's smart since she has already trained her parents.

Its the trade off for me and my wife. We have 2 kids, 3 1/2 and 1 1/2. Its pretty hard to allow the 3 1/2yr old to watch TV and not the 1 1/2yr old. We also have 1 on the way which is going to make it that much harder to do. Though 80% of TV watching by the older one is done when the younger one is napping (and most of that isn't really TV watching, it is playing on my computer on PBSkids.org, he is scary good with computers already).

That said, the youngest one and to a lesser degree the older one friggen loves Thomas the Tank Engine. It may be bad for him, but you know what, sometimes independent play isn't an option because he is just in a stinking bad mood (teething, tired because he woke up too early and won't go back to bed at 5:30am, sick, etc). You know what happens, parenting gets farmed out for half an hour or an hour to Thomas the Tank Engine or Sesame Street to keep the parentals from going insane (my wife stays home with the kids and I sometimes work way too long) after a long day or a way, way, way too early wake-up. When things aren't "dire" we spend plenty of time playing with them, teaching them things, reading to them, encouraging them to play on their own, together, with friends outside etc.

Color me a bad parent if you will, but at least they are feed, clothed, housed, loved and educated when that 30 minutes to an hourish of TV isn't on per day (maybe 2hrs w/ the older one if you include PBSkids.org, or as my son loves to ask, "Can I play PBS kids dot org on the dot com on Daddy's computer?").

... I don't see how classical music can influence a baby and stimulate their intellect any more than Soulja Boy.

I think it's based on "The Mozart Effect" where several different research groups have shown that listening to Mozart will temporarily increase "spatial-temporal reasoning".

My completely baseless explanation on why classical may be beneficial: it presents much more complicated rhythm, dynamic, and tonal structure to the brain versus almost any pop music. Perhaps this added aural complexity improves the brain's processing capability somewhat. (The studies say it is temporary.)

We started our little man with classic movie musicals. He learned to have an attention span. And having the dialogue interspersed with the musical numbers also gave us great break-points.

Our kid lived for Thomas the Tank Engine from 10 months-old to age 3 1/2. The Thomas videos were sweet and the only child show offerings that did not incite me to violence.

(I still want to beat to near death the people behind Dora and Bob the Builder... and when they heal, I want to do it again. -> Barney Must Die!)

Our son turned twelve two weeks ago and is getting straight A's in 8th grade. He will walk out this year with three high-school credits, one of them being Algebra I Intensified. He will graduate two years ahead of his peers.

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

Scurrilous

You're right! I'll just calmly explain that to my infant who emits ear-piercing screams every time someone is not holding her! "Entertain yourself, please!" Or we'll just start dinner at 1:00 when she takes a nap.

So then; what she has learned is that every time she screams you will drop everything to pay attention to her? Now you just have to hope that it doesn't carry on for the rest of your life

My thoughts exactly. At least she's smart since she has already trained her parents.

Your sarcasm isn't exactly welcome.

There's a balance, as in everything, between "training" a kid to be independent and "training" a kid that their parents are ignoring the kid.

The real issue is who's need is greater; the kid's need for the parent or the parent's need to ignore the kid (for whatever reason), plus the sanity bonus of how much screaming the parent can stand whilst doing laundry/cooking/cleaning/etc.

My in-laws purchased the 'your baby can read' videos for our boy when he was six months old. I'd agree with the 'mesmerizing glowing box' description for a kid under a certain age. But when he started the first inklings of speech at somewhere between twelve and eighteen months, he really started to interact with the videos and worked hard to repeat the words he saw and heard on the screen. I would say the 1-1.5 hours of TV per day of TV time is a legit number, though I've never measured.

So how do you suppose his language skills would have developed during that time if you were reading and speaking to him during the 1-1.5 hours per day? You're a lot more interactive (I hope) than the TV.

I'll admit that I didn't give you much to go on, but I'll say it anyway: You don't have much to go on. I assure you that he's well taken care of and as intellectually sharp and physically able as any other two year old.

You'll never hear me say otherwise. I certainly am not questioning your capabilities as a parent, because I don't know them.

I was just posing a rhetorical statement for the purposes of spurring conversation.

My wife is at home and knows more about his daily habits than I do, so I can't say with any certainty what his daily TV intake is, but I can say the PS3 gets used more for Bob the Builder than Need for Speed.

We read to him and with him constantly. He climbs around on the playground almost every day. He cooks with us. He counts to 10 and screws up the order of 13 through 19 and calls 20 "2010." He jumps off furniture. He identifies letters and knows their sounds. And just this weekend he started saying "Mommy - M. Daddy - D," which was a really nice surprise. I'm pretty sure he's an average kid but to us he's the smartest toddler on the planet.

Also he's not quite two, and only as parents have we grown to understand the use of months to identify a child over a year. The difference between 18 and 22 months is like the difference between a 21 and 40 year old.

@HedPhuqtI think it makes sense that reading videos help your child with reading because children can learn to read and speak at birth. Things that probably DON'T help are shows like barney. Lets say that you wanted to learn japanese. I don't think that you would learn much from watching japanese televsion shows where they are speaking using complex sentences and a large range of vocabulary, just like a baby wouldn't be able to learn to speak english by watching barney. Babies usually start speaking with words like bye bye, daddy, and mommy because you get a specific reaction from these words and they are repeated frequently. ex: older son yells mommy, mother comes, you can infer that the person coming is mommy. Also babies have a limited understanding of culture, hand signals, and body language. So combining this with a string of words would, understandably, confuse a child.@silver7i think that the point of sitting you child in front of the TV is to educate/entertain them while you are busy. so it would make sense that they will not replace that time with dedicated teaching. I do believe that, given the chance, most parents would teach their children rather than sitting them in front of the TV.

Who are these kids that will sit and watch TV for two or more hours a day? I've got a 21 month old, and he just started using my tablet (toshiba thrive) for watching videos about bulldozers. I'd be interested to see what the studies are on tablet use are when they come out. You could not get him to sit still through 5 full minutes of sesame street before he'd wander off to play with his blocks, but he'll be willing to sit there for almost a half hour watching videos about big trucks as long as the youTube app keeps feeding him good related videos. Twenty minutes to a half hour of that and he's bored with it and gets up to go run around again.

Even now he likes to turn the TV on, but just for the noise. I catch the kid with the TV on in the morning (The View of all things), but he's never watching it. It's just there for the noise, and he's just as happy if he can figure out how to toss a CD into the DVD player and get that up and running (burned through 2 dvd players and our wii, but he's got it down now).

Anecdotal to a degree, yes. But I compare him to his peers who've gone to the same schools, same socioeconomic background etc... and the difference is obvious.

It was not just TV. As others have rightly pointed out, it the the time spent with him and the quality of it that is making the difference.

There are dozens of both small and large choices that we have made in the rearing of our child. Each has worked together to bring our guy to his current outstanding state. Also, there is the fact that I and my wife have truly worked as a team on this.

Our reward is that our son will be well prepared when he reaches his majority and that we three are having a blast in the meantime.

Were socioeconomic factors adequately taken into account in the infant/toddler TV viewing study? I'm not certain. - Also, how long was the effect of the delay of children who watched TV as an infant? The Mozart effect is temporary. Is it possible that delays in development related to TV watching disappear by the time the child is in kindergarten?

Below are a couple of quotes from a summary of the article cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The complete article is not available for free. Only a summary or abstract can be viewed through Google.

Quote:

Although there were several limitations to this study, it did find significant associations between baby DVD/video viewing and one measure of development.

MethodologyMore than 1000 parents of children ages 2 to 24 months were surveyed by telephone.

I wonder were the test subjects selected at random? What community and how large of a community were used in the test sample? Was this a group of families in a college town mixing together people of very different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds? It's hard to know from the summary information.

* So, from my experience in the field and being a parent myself I have this advice.- Read to your children and interact with them as much as possible.- If the watching of educational TV programs such as Sesame Street allows the parent/caregiver to be less stressed and reduce yelling and reduce-eliminate physical punishment, then I think a little bit of TV time is worth the risk.

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

Scurrilous

You're right! I'll just calmly explain that to my infant who emits ear-piercing screams every time someone is not holding her! "Entertain yourself, please!" Or we'll just start dinner at 1:00 when she takes a nap.

So then; what she has learned is that every time she screams you will drop everything to pay attention to her? Now you just have to hope that it doesn't carry on for the rest of your life

My thoughts exactly. At least she's smart since she has already trained her parents.

Your sarcasm isn't exactly welcome.

There's a balance, as in everything, between "training" a kid to be independent and "training" a kid that their parents are ignoring the kid.

The real issue is who's need is greater; the kid's need for the parent or the parent's need to ignore the kid (for whatever reason), plus the sanity bonus of how much screaming the parent can stand whilst doing laundry/cooking/cleaning/etc.

I'd agree with you except for the "screaming" part. A child who screams whenever not being held or paid attention to is a spoiled child, period. A child who asks in appropriate ways for attention and is told "Not right now" is completely different from one who screams. That's my 2 cents and that of my child therapist partner.

Babies cannot be trained to learn a foreign language (or at least their brain 'primed', ie. having the ability to simply recognize the basic sounds of a language) using a TV.When they're exposed to a human being pronouncing the sounds, they learn.When they're exposed to a TV or and audio recording of people speaking, their brain classify it as an environmental sound (something emitted by an inanimate object)

Seems like an evolutionary trait that makes sense, basic audio filter tuning of the language region of the brain on things that matters (other meatballs), ignoring what doesn't (environmental sounds).And there's no reason to thinks that what works for foreign language works differently for the native language (but doing an experiment is not an option, not exposing a baby to any human speaking would be potentially very damaging).

Bottom line: letting a 2yo baby in front of the TV, instead of putting it in the room where adults are having a conversation will probably degrade it's language abilities. Not exposing him to foreign language speaker will degrade it's ability to learn that foreign language.

You have to take all these studies with a grain of salt. Because what they don't tell you is: EVERY KID IS DIFFERENT. Take mine:

Kid number 1: Loved Baby Einstein (and still watches it with his little brother) from about 12 months. Graduated to Thomas the Tank Engine by 18 months. By 2 years he could name every character (50+) and had his favorite stories memorized (yes, he could recite them, although someone who didn't know the story might have a hard time understanding him). Reading by age 2.5. Now at age 9, reads at an adult level and enjoys many of the same books I do (Harry Potter, etc.). Not sure TV impacted him negatively before age 2, though I suppose it's possible.

Kid number 2: No interest in TV until just before age 2. He didn't care whether it was on or not, and it didn't ever stop him from crying or keep him busy or entertained in any way. HOWEVER, this one has been able to operate an iPhone/iPod Touch fluently since about 12 months. Knows how to find "his" apps, can manipulate them expertly, and (to our chagrin) knows how to quit them and get into something he shouldn't. First one to create parental controls for the iPhone gets my money! He's 2.25 now and just learning to talk, a bit behind schedule, but there's a crafty brain inside his head for sure. Definitely don't see any way TV affected his development, which was quite different from his brother's.

Bottom line: Don't use TV as a babysitter (ok, no more than 15-30 minutes...every parent needs a break occasionally!). Interact with them and find out how they learn - then you'll know how to use TV in their development.

There's a balance, as in everything, between "training" a kid to be independent and "training" a kid that their parents are ignoring the kid.

The real issue is who's need is greater; the kid's need for the parent or the parent's need to ignore the kid (for whatever reason), plus the sanity bonus of how much screaming the parent can stand whilst doing laundry/cooking/cleaning/etc.

I'd agree with you except for the "screaming" part. A child who screams whenever not being held or paid attention to is a spoiled child, period.

It's escalation:Motion->Babble->Whine->Cry->Scream

Then there's colic. Screaming unfortunately is an appropriate response to colic. Holding the child is apparently one of the only ways to address it.

Quote:

A child who asks in appropriate ways for attention and is told "Not right now" is completely different from one who screams. That's my 2 cents and that of my child therapist partner.

What do you do when the child is colicky? My wife had to wean herself from dairy and meat for several months and we still had the occasional bout.

Color me a bad parent if you will, but at least they are feed, clothed, housed, loved and educated when that 30 minutes to an hourish of TV isn't on per day (maybe 2hrs w/ the older one if you include PBSkids.org, or as my son loves to ask, "Can I play PBS kids dot org on the dot com on Daddy's computer?").

You are doing fine, relax. Your kids' brains won't be mush, at least not all that much.

I have 3 kids. My youngest is the absolute smartest, in no small part due to the copying and competing with older siblings.

My oldest (15) likes NIN and Robot Chicken videos, and thus so does the youngest (6). She would explain them to her preschool teachers. In is fundamentally impossible to prevent the transfer of information to an individual living connected in a group with others.

That love thing makes up for a whole hell of a lot, really, truly, deeply.

A friend once told me "If it wasn't for Barney the Dinosaur, I wouldn't have been able to get a shower for two years." So that sort of thing I can understand - Mama needs 15 minutes to grab a shower, get dinner going, etc, so fine, park the offspring in front of the glowing box for a bit. Hours on end, though, not so much.

And now we know why all parents were so stinky before TV was invented: They could never, ever bath because human children are incapable of developing the capacity to entertain themselves before age two. Luckily, TV came along just in time to solve this evolutionary faux pas and prevent the baby boomers from thinking their parents stank.

Sarcasm aside, kids throughout history and all over the world have learned/learn the trick of spending 15 minutes at a time being a little bit independent without TV.

Scurrilous

Yup. The problem is that those 15 minutes are spent chasing the cat or trying to launch themselves to their doom in a huge variety of creative ways. I swear kids come with a built in augmented reality kit that highlights anything remotely dangerous and paints it a big bright inviting colour.

This is exactly why it's so tough being a parent these days, You have the informed and the uniformed who want to ram their ideas down your throats. I'll listen to anyone's ideas but if there is no science backing it I'm going to steer clear. Our 9 month old has watched 5mins TOTAL TV in his whole life. It doesn't take einstein to realise that a baby has no understanding of the reality of TV images, or an ability to process the meaning behind the images (they have no contextual understanding at all). Babies have only a rudimentary understanding of the world, and they are like sponges. I've had to justify our no TV stance to science teachers (amoung other professionals who should know better) who are happy for their young kids to watch hours of the stuff.

What's worse is that TV programming has moved to fast cuts, crash zooms and short scenes and increasingly more graphic violence and negative themes. Cartoons these days are like the Flitstones on acid. There is an avalanche of information thrown at a stupefied TV audience faster that any of it can be processed. If you watch older shows these days most people find them boring, and it's not that the inane content has changed much but that the speed with which the medium is thrown at us is in overdrive.

I can't physically watch more than 30 minutes of commercial TV as the effects on my brain are stupifiying. There has been much research conducted on advertising and TV and there's not a lot of positives to say. It's brainwashing on an epic scale. I challenge anyone who does not agree.. spend a month TV free and then try going back. Most people don't even question the drivel being thrown at them.

I would disagree with the idea that there is no benefit whatsoever. My 14-month-old daughter and I communicate relatively well thanks to Baby Signing Time, and she knows more signs than my wife and I combined. And for those who might think this stunts her speech development, I can assure you this is not the case. :)

I love all these posters writing "Nah, my 1 year old watches TV all the time and interacts meaningfully with it." Not in any state of denial, are we? Could it be that they can't bear to be without a glowing screen themselves, no matter what the potential damage to their infants?

I love all these posters writing "Nah, my 1 year old watches TV all the time and interacts meaningfully with it." Not in any state of denial, are we? Could it be that they can't bear to be without a glowing screen themselves, no matter what the potential damage to their infants?

A little assuming, eh?

If I were having a private tutor come to my house to teach my child letters, words, signing, and about foreign cultures I don't think anyone would question my motives, but because it isn't being presented in-person or on a stage, and out of the same device that is able to air "Jersey Shore," there is some prejudice against it. And heaven forbid if I straightened up around the house while that was going on...

It goes without saying that I spend time with my child. We watch TV (some), "we" read books, we play. If our time together was servicing a TV addiction, she would be a lot more familiar with Don Draper and Jack Bauer than she would Elmo and Grover.

I love all these posters writing "Nah, my 1 year old watches TV all the time and interacts meaningfully with it." Not in any state of denial, are we? Could it be that they can't bear to be without a glowing screen themselves, no matter what the potential damage to their infants?

How about the fact that our children are our responsibility, not yours, and we think we're doing a good job at it? Leave your criticism to yourself.

My kid does distance learning for her school which means she's stuck in front of a computer for half her schoolwork.

There's a lot of focus in these comments today on television content, which, if I'm not completely misreading the studies I've seen, is an irrelevant issue when it comes to effects on learning in the first 24 months. I CANNOT find the darned link to it, but a study I saw sometime last year, researchers were indicating that the rapid, non-naturally-occurring refresh rate of the images on modern monitors MAY BE an issue worth studying further. Doesn't matter whether the content is Barney or Baby Einstein or Full Tilt Poker or porn -- our brains have long been hardwired to receive and process information entering the visual cortex at a natural, not artificial, speed. The working theory goes: as an infant's brain is developing, it becomes used to the way electronic images are refreshed with extraordinary rapidity; as they grow older, their visual cortex, accustomed to images characterized by that rapid refresh rate, struggles to process and/or observe the real world at its natural speed. They SPECULATED that this dichotomy MAY POSSIBLY be a factor that could influence autistic tendencies, but recommended specifically focused studies. (For what it's worth, just like food and anything else in modern life, the cathode-ray devices we adults viewed as children were monumentally different than the current products of our rapidly and constantly evolving technology.) Seems to me this is an area of research that has some real promise , and ought to be pursued with vigor.

What do you do when the child is colicky? My wife had to wean herself from dairy and meat for several months and we still had the occasional bout.

Matter of fact, my first kid was quite colicky and it took a while to figure out he was lactose intolerant. Holding him didn't actually change the crying aside form just a second or two at first. Assuming one is seeing the pediatrician regularly, these things get figured out. I hold to my opinion that simply picking up a child to make them stop screaming is inappropriate but will modify it to include it as a form of neglect instead of simply spoiling a kid. Seriously, a screaming kid can mean something's wrong but establishing a pattern of "I will do what you want when you scream" is just not a good thing. They need to learn to communicate using some other method.

Now, I don't hold to limiting kids completely aside from the early years. I think that some screen time can be beneficial. I like to use the analogy of food. Too much can be bad but not enough can also be an issue; the key is everyone's different. Certainly, screen time spent learning is good. I think part of what we need as a society is to find a good way to measure whether something's educational or simply entertaining. Now, that's not to say that some things aren't obviously one or the other but I wish we had a way to measure the efficacy of educational screen time in something a little more immediate than a multi-year study. Maybe that's a pipe dream, I'm not sure.

I tend to agree. I've got a very hard time believing refresh rates somehow induce autism. Our eyes don't actually see with a "refresh rate" to begin with, as I understand it. I'd have to see pretty compelling evidence of a mechanism to cause this. Sure, flickering screens (or just flickering lights) can set off seizures in those predisposed to them but this doesn't mean they cause them. Of course, autism (a terribly imprecise word) is not the same as epilepsy but the point is correlation does not equal causation.

Im surprised to see so many parents trying to justify letting their children/infants watching tv. Simply disregarding science and using examples like "my child watched tv and he did ok".

Its just sad.

No it isn't.

Simply disregarding science = not getting kids vaccinated.

Defending behavior that has already occurred = human behavior. There's no indication that this behavior (watching TV) is actually harmful. By harmful I mean dangerous.

Language development delays != no language development (and, in my defense, my daughter learned sign language from her TV time. That is measurable language development, especially in the preverbal stage of 16m! My son had no love of TV and was speaking by 16m even without it)

Also, my daughter clearly understood what was happening on the TV (the linked study says about 2 years, but she was mimicking Wesley and Buttercup by 16m, as well, indicating she obviously knew there was people on the TV)

Look nobody is claiming your child will die of brain cancer or get aids from watching tv. And maybe if you are unable to take care of your child, there are worse things they can do than watch tv. Nobody is perfect.

I simply reacted to the fact that so many used their child as proof that science was wrong. I really dont care if your children watched a lot of tv, its their loss. And its NOT science. My son is still to young to understand anything from tv, but when he is ready I look forward to watching good tv and movies together. Tv is not evil. Until then im kind of relieved that the tv is off, it seems to make everybody more happy and relaxed. But im not stating that as a scientific fact, and if there in the future is evidence that children who watch tv before they are able to understand anything helps them develop into better and healthier humans i am probably wrong and science is probably right. I do what I think is best based on what current science recommends.

If you disregard scientific findings or even concerns then its != science. Unless you can come up with some scientific findings that strengthens your theory, and you have not.

Except the science explicitly, as I mentioned, allows for it, meaning it isn't wrong. The fact is my daughter could understand TV before two, which invalidates the idea that to her it was a glowing mesmerizing box devoid of content. The same with her ability to learn sign language from the TV, a case where she was advancing her development as opposed to retarding it.

So, yes, there are scientific findings that do strengthen my theory; my daughter was more capable, for whatever reason, than your son, so the TV was instructional instead of distracting. We also interacted, we did sign language lessons (I already mentioned early on my daughter does distance learning, which is merely an extension of the educational aspects we had already adopted). She mimicked people on TV, including sign language, behavior, and dance, and has no signs of being harmed and every symptom of being helped by TV. Ergo the science validates the use of TV in her situation!